Anyone can post things online, which serves as both a blessing and a curse. That means that within a sea of incredibly valuable information, there is an onslaught of red-herrings to turn you towards or away from products in invalid ways.

Looking at reviews of products online can be a very helpful part of the online shopping process, but the problem arises when you begin to wonder if the reviews for a product can actually be trusted. You do not want to spend money on a product based on reviews when the reviews turn out not to be trustworthy. Fortunately, it is possible to tell if an online review is valid or invalid: a discovery that will save you a lot of time and money! Follow these expert tips when deciding whether to trust an online review.

1. Don’t Trust a Perfect Review

If you find a product on a website, such as Amazon, with a five-star rating there are two possibilities: either the review is untrustworthy, or you just found the best product on the internet. It is very likely the former.

Products with absolutely outstanding reviews likely have them because the company has come in and given the product numerous five-star reviews to hike up the ratings of the product. Therefore, if you are thinking that a review is too good to be true, it is very likely that it is too good to be true.

A way to get around these false reviews is to look at the most negative review of the product. If the most negative review is also of a very high rating, it is likely that the product is very good. However, if the most negative rating gives the product one star and there are numerous mid-level ratings for the product, it might not be worth your money.

2. Look for Special Markings

On the flip side of the previous tip, skepticism at the popularity of a product can only take you so far. Sometimes a product online is truly fantastic, and you will miss out on it if you assume that the reviews are positively unreal. That is why there are certain verification markings that you can look out for.

Something to keep an eye out for when reading customer reviews is a “verified purchase” watermark. This symbol signifies that the reviewer has been verified as a real person who actually purchased the product and is reviewing it. If a review has an incredibly positive response and this symbol, then it’s likely that it is truly a functional, good product.

This symbol or symbols like it are not the be all end all when it comes to reviews, but they are incredibly helpful. You cannot completely invalidate reviews that do not have a signifier like this. But rather than canceling other reviews out, it serves to positively verify a large group of reviews that may help you in your product research.

3. More Is Not Better

While in many instances, such as in an experiment, higher rates of participation help promote the validity, with online reviews this is not the case. With scientific research, for instance, higher rates of clinical participation can be crucial to case studies for correcting squint eye in adults and children. But with reviews, more is not always better. It is very easy to believe that a product with one hundred reviews must contain a high number of real buyers. But in fact, it has been tested that some sites in fact have hundreds of invalid reviews either made by the company or other untrustworthy sources. The higher the number of reviews, the less likely it is that a negative review will be able to have an impact on the rating of the product.

If there are an impressive number of positive reviews, it is very likely a manipulated review. It is also very unlikely that three hundred some-odd people felt so passionately positive about a product that they simply had to run to the internet to share their feelings online. It is instead more likely that a group of paid individuals spammed a subpar product with great praises, prompting a handful of less enthusiastic people to purchase the product.

For that reason, the most trustworthy reviews are mixed reviews that appear in small numbers. There is a lot of power in small numbers because it means the company has not added a large number of their own reviews in an attempt to affect the average result. It is far more likely, therefore, that the reviews are from a few, opinionated customers of the product. These few, opinionated people are the key to identifying if a review can or cannot be trusted.